What Are Friends For?

My friend Joe inherited a poker table. It's a smart-looking piece, with a green felt top and eight sides. At each side are a built-in, felt-lined chip well and two recessed drink holders. (Party on!) The table came out of his late uncle's apartment in Brooklyn. Now it's in Joe's house in Connecticut.

Luckily, Joe has five friends who like to play poker. Unluckily, it's his job to get them all together on the same Friday night. "The desire is there; the time isn't always there," he says. "Setting it up can take weeks and weeks." One guy is off at a conference in Colorado, another has a family birthday party....You know how it is.

Months can go by without a card party. Which means the table sits folded up in the furnace room.

By itself, that's pretty far down the list of life's terrible tragedies. But as you read this story, you'll see how a fine old poker table stowed under a bedsheet is a workable symbol of the largest unexplored issue in men's health.

It turns out Joe is not the only guy spending his Friday nights friendless. According to the experts, you're likely to be just as isolated, just as lacking in human connections. (No, "networking" doesn't count.) It's a combination of many things. You're a man. You're an American. You live in an age of e-mail, 80-hour work weeks, flight delays, and Palm Pilots, an age of wondrous technological advances -- and a social fabric that's coming apart at the seams.

In his recent book Bowling Alone, the Harvard professor Robert D. Putnam catalogs the disappearing social connections among Americans. He looks at everything -- local meeting attendance, membership in civic groups like the Kiwanis or Lions or PTA, church attendance, participation in league bowling. In all these categories and more, Americans increasingly are marked "absent." According to Putnam, our social interactions are roughly half what they were at their peak in the early 1960s. In some cases the decline is precipitous. If club membership continues to fall at its present rate, for instance, clubs will be extinct in less than 20 years, says Putnam.

If you're part of the problem, you're saying, So what? I'll leave it to the pundits to wring their hands over what this trend means to the future of our democracy. Instead, let's examine its hidden effects on health. The studies have been done; the findings are in.

The Benefits

A Dartmouth study of open-heart-surgery patients found that those without a social support network were four times as likely to be dead 6 months later.

In America, the health effects of social connection began to be measured more than 50 years ago with the Roseto study. Roseto is a small town in eastern Pennsylvania whose settlers came from the same village in southern Italy. They suffered less than half as many heart attacks as residents of two nearby towns. Everything was the same in the three towns except for this: In Roseto, people were part of a tightly knit web of ties to block, church, club, coworkers, and community. Starting in the 1960s, a younger generation gave up the old-fashioned ways -- and the heart-attack rate began to rise.

Other large-scale, long-term studies in the 1980s and '90s tested the Roseto results and confirmed the findings. All found that loners were two to five times more likely to get sick and die prematurely.

The evidence is overwhelming. The effect is astonishing. "As a rough rule of thumb, if you belong to no groups but decide to join one, you cut your risk of dying over the next year in half," Putnam writes in Bowling Alone. "If you smoke and belong to no groups, it's a toss-up statistically whether you should stop smoking or start joining."

This "anticivic epidemic," as Putnam calls it, jeopardizes men more than women. "On average, women spend a lot more time and energy connecting with others," Putnam told me. "So it seems quite likely that men really are in greater danger, both physically and mentally, from our failure to invest in relationships with other people."

Self-Defense

Most mornings, Constantine, a guy I know from Boston, wakes up to an empty house. His wife, Susan, rises early, does a load of laundry, and is off to work by the time he rolls out of bed. He pads around their suburban Victorian, has breakfast by himself, and gets into Levis and a denim shirt. Then he heads down the hall to his home office and sits at his drafting table. As an architect in a solo practice, he spends 90 percent of his workday there.

"It amazes me, how alone I am," he says. "I grew up in a three-family house with grandparents and uncles and aunts. I'm Greek; it was an old-world scene." These days, his life is a perfect example of the new scene.

Given his isolation, I'd say Constantine is a dead man walking. But there's one saving grace: He's part of a men's group. Every other Thursday night at 7, five of them meet at somebody's house. The host puts out dinner and opens the beers, and they talk.

"When we started 23 years ago, it was almost in self-defense because of the strength of the women's movement," says Constantine. Women were beginning to beat up on men, and most of the men in the group had strong wives. In those early years, each discussion began with a formal theme. But all that fell away long ago. "We count on what's happening in our lives to provide something to talk about," he says.

Those are five very different lives. You have to wonder: How did an engineer, a biology professor, a vice president of marketing, a college administrator, and an architect ever get together? Constantine got married late and never had children; the others married early and have kids in high school and college. Not one is a joiner.

They're all in their 50s now, and the talk often turns to grim issues like the death of parents. In the past, they talked about their kids. Always, they talk about their marriages. Why is it, they wonder together, that sex goes down the tubes after marriage, and why doesn't everyone just admit it and warn you beforehand?

Recently, one guy in the group went through the breakup of his 20-year marriage. At such times, "We'll hunker down, do the listening, then feel free to give support and advice," Constantine says. It's never a pity party. "We don't have much patience for victims."

But weeks can go by without any deep thoughts. An outsider might wonder what keeps these guys together. Little might he realize: That time is equally valuable. "Our history is important," Constantine says. "Just having spent the years with each other is a gift in itself. We've come to realize that, and it's the juice that still motivates us."

What's To Blame?

Constantine's group is an inspiration, and an oddity. Who or what is to blame for the isolation that prevails in men's lives? I asked a few regular guys. Tony in Georgia says we're isolated because we have to drive everywhere. Our daily commutes burn up all our free time. In Canada, Buzz blames greed and selfishness. "I believe people make choices deliberately, bit by bit, embracing what is futile while abandoning what is meaningful." Larry in Montana just got back from a vacation in Costa Rica, and he believes the cause is money. "Money insulates," he says. "When you drive through Costa Rica, everybody is outdoors. You see village life."

Others have attributed the problem to the Internet, e-mail, Watergate, the '60s, working moms, divorce, big government, and the global economy.

Putnam blames the pressures of work, especially the pressure on two-career families, for roughly 10 percent of our civic decline. Ditto commuting and suburban sprawl. Television takes more of the rap; it's roughly 25 percent of the problem simply because it sucks up much of our free time. And an equally large piece of the puzzle is a generational shift in attitude.

This shift started with the baby boomers, and in generation X it's only gotten worse. To oversimplify only a little: Nobody under 50 gives a rat's ass about anyone outside his or her small circle of family, friends, and a few coworkers. Young people are disconnected, and they don't care. They might enjoy watching Jon Stewart do his daily sendup of the nightly news, but they wouldn't be caught dead watching the real thing.

True enough, but I think men sometimes adopt this attitude out of sheer necessity. As in, When was the last time I got home in time to watch the nightly news? You spend your prime years building a career, working like a fiend, and every spare minute is soaked up by helping around the house and hanging with your kids. Before you know it, 10 or 20 years have gone by, and you're walking around in that preoccupied, here-but-not-here mode all the time. Yes, you've been a hard charger, a man with a plan. Which is why your wife married you -- and why she sometimes wonders why she married you. Now you're in your 40s and she's telling you to slow down, smell the roses, learn to play again. At first you're defensive. But you know what she means: Your work has separated you from your own life.

If you're blessed with a good wife, she starts meddling. One woman I know decided that her husband was getting too stressed out in his marketing job. She thought a diversion would do him good. So she quietly volunteered him as the coach of his son's hockey team. When he got the telephone call, she said, "Oh, honey, what a wonderful idea!" It was a wonderful idea. He did it, and now he's grateful to be more involved in the life of his kid and his community.

Some guys make this adjustment all by themselves. They switch from competing to connecting; they seem to shift the inner gears effortlessly as they move into their 50s. Good for them. Most of us need a little help from our friends.

So, here's one free trip to a Harvard psychiatrist. His name is Edward M. Hallowell, M.D., but let's call him Ned. He's that kind of guy -- a big, jovial fellow with a quick laugh and curly salt-and-pepper hair. These are Dr. Ned's orders: Find a buddy and play squash once a week.

Or basketball, or tiddledywinks. Name your sport. The only thing that matters is, and let me quote him now, for total accuracy, "you've got to have the beer afterward."

Making The Connection

Dr. Ned is the author of Connect. In his book, he defines connection as "a feeling of being a part of something larger than yourself." For some people, connections are made through a cultivated appreciation of art or nature or history, through their pets, or through spiritual faith. For others, connections link us to family members, friends, coworkers, neighbors, and our communities. We connect when we talk, even briefly, with someone else, and when, for the moment at least, nobody's needling or whining or one-upping or hustling or being hustled.

Dr. Hallowell takes his own advice. Every other Tuesday afternoon at 2:30, he plays squash with his friend Peter. They've done this for 20 years. And for the past 17 years, he's also played with a group of guys every Sunday morning. He and his wife have season tickets to the Patriots with other couples, and they get together for tailgate parties before the games.

Sports is a popular way for guys to connect, and a regular game provides a structure that prevents friends from drifting apart. But connections aren't limited to games. "People will find the connections that work for them," Dr. Ned says. "It could be bowling or a softball team. Maybe a dinner group, maybe a book group. A friend of mine who read my book says he's going to start an investors' club, and they're going to meet once a month at a bar."

Unfortunately, our society now frowns upon the one time-tested avenue of noncompetitive male bonding: the men's club. Anytime three or more men get together these days, the Official Spokeswomen for Women immediately get suspicious. Witness the outcry over the Promise Keepers conventions of a few years ago. Uh-oh! Men talking amongst themselves! "That's been against the rules," Dr. Hallowell acknowledges. "And then, when we do get together, it's supposed to be all touchy-feely, which men don't want to do."

And they don't have to. Dr. Ned says: No mush allowed. "Just get together, talk about money, about sports, whatever. The subtext will be connecting. The minute you make it explicit, men run in the other direction."

Other than that, there's no secret to connecting. "We all know how to do it," he says. "Do you want to do it or not?"

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